Giorgio Rutigliano has recently made available a website dedicated to FidoNet Italia.
[wiki base=”Wikipedia EN”]FidoNet[/wiki] is the amateur telematic network that was born and spread worldwide between the 80s and the early 2000s, before the Internet was widely available and accessible. It was based on the use of analog modems connected to normal voice telephone lines and on asynchronous communications, that is, sending a message took hours / days to arrive at its destination and the same amount of time needed for replies to return to the sender.
I was part of FidoNet Italia, as a member node, from around 1989 until 1996/97. I came out not so much for the legal problems connected to Fidobust, but rather because the passion for real-time communications represented by chats, IRC, Videotel grew in me and I had less and less interest in leaving my PC dedicated to the BBS.
It must be said that the FidoNet worldwide network has never ceased to exist in all these years. Membership has decreased a lot but a certain number of nodes have always remained active, especially in countries where it has also become a vehicle for political activism.
Recently in Italy there has been a flashback for Fidonet and the BBS, even if limited to old users and Sysop who still have memories of the past, and some nodes are returning to be operational on the network using the internet as transport instead of the old lines telephone.
I have not yet seriously considered the idea of being able to go back online, but maybe who knows …
